Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

An area with study groups for various languages. Group members help each other, share resources and experience. Study groups are permanent but the members rotate and change.
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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby rdearman » Fri Feb 19, 2021 11:49 am

Deinonysus wrote:Disney+ has added the Navajo dubs for Star Wars (the original) and Finding Nemo! You can't select it from the normal dub menu, it's in the "extras" tab.

Bit of trivia.
One of our members DavePrine has a speaking part in the Star Wars Navajo dubbing. :)
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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby lichtrausch » Thu Jun 30, 2022 12:55 pm

El futuro de la lengua náhuatl (Nahuatla'tolli)
Para que salga de esta situación poco segura se necesita ante todo que se haga un estándar oficialmente reconocido de la lengua. Según mi opinión, este estándar tiene que fundarse en el náhuatl clásico y en los dialectos actuales más parecidos a ello, como los del Distrito Federal y de la región de Texcoco. La motivación es simple y clara: la mayor parte del legado cultural de la población de habla náhuatl ha sido escrito en náhuatl clásico y esta variante dialectal fue usada como lengua oficial y lengua comercial durante el primer siglo de la época colonial. Incluso en los países centroamericanos una parte considerable de documentos históricos fueron escritos en náhuatl clásico. Los argumentos en contra formulados por los partidarios del "dialectismo" son poco convincentes cuando comparamos la situación del náhuatl con la de las lenguas dialectos minoritarios de Europa. La comprensión mutua entre el náhuatl del Milpa Alta y el nahua-pipil de El Salvador es más completa que la existente entre el dialecto de mi pueblo en la provincia de Güeldres y el holandés que se habla en las ciudades cercanas a unos veinte kilómetros de distancia.

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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby piotr » Thu Dec 15, 2022 9:58 pm

OK, I've studied two languages of Native Americans. Years ago, I studied Quechua (principally Ayacucho Quechua) and I'm currently studying Tikuna/Ticuna. But what is this whole "Team Americas" thing and what are the tasks? :shock:

Someone wrote he/she would possibly learn Quechua. I could possibly help with materials or something... But, Quechua is a language family enclosing at least several mutually unintelligible languages (more or less like Spanish and Romanian) and hundreds of dialects. As there are hundreds of indigenous languages in the Americas (and dozens of families and isolates), what's the probability that two or more group members pick up the same language :?:
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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Jan 11, 2023 11:34 pm

piotr wrote:OK, I've studied two languages of Native Americans. Years ago, I studied Quechua (principally Ayacucho Quechua) and I'm currently studying Tikuna/Ticuna. But what is this whole "Team Americas" thing and what are the tasks? :shock:

Someone wrote he/she would possibly learn Quechua. I could possibly help with materials or something... But, Quechua is a language family enclosing at least several mutually unintelligible languages (more or less like Spanish and Romanian) and hundreds of dialects. As there are hundreds of indigenous languages in the Americas (and dozens of families and isolates), what's the probability that two or more group members pick up the same language :?:

Sorry, I hadn't subscribed to this topic so it took me a while to see that you posted.

There are no tasks, this is just a thread to discuss things related to studying indigenous languages of the Americas.

While it is true that there are more indiginous languages than can be counted, a learner isn't equally likely to learn each of the thousands of languages. Learners are most likely to gravitate to languages that are famous and/or have good resources, so you do see a good amount of overlap. People are much more likely to study Navajo, Mohawk, Cherokee, Inuktitut, Cuzco Quechua, Guaraní, Nahuatl, etc. than a random Salishan language from Alaska with 20 speakers and no resources.

I mentioned in the first post that I had studied Navajo and Inuktitut. A couple of regulars have also studied Navajo, and I've even come across one or two people here who have studied Inuktitut. I've also looked into resources for Mohawk, and others here have studied that too.
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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby księżycowy » Thu Jan 12, 2023 7:47 am

I don't believe there are any Salishan languages spoken as far north as Alaska. There are plenty of Northern Athabascan languages that do not have a lot of speakers in Alaska though.

I believe Aleut has few speakers as well. It's better documented and has better resources, but the future isn't looking fantastic for the language at the moment. Hopefully they can turn it around. Alutiiq isn't far behind.

Of course, revitalization attempts are being made for several of these languages.

(I must be one of the unconventional learners as I'm setting to learn Aleut, and Deg Hitan which has somewhere between 2-14 speakers. I'm also quite interested in Eyak, which is seeing a revival after going extinct. Not that there are tonnes of resources for either Deg Xitan or Eyak, but there are some very well out together free web courses. I don't expect to get super far with either, regardless.)

After being reacquainted with this thread, I feel like 2023 should reignite my exploration of these languages. Thanks for the reminder Deinonysus. :)

EDIT: Spelling.
Last edited by księżycowy on Thu Jan 12, 2023 10:19 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby księżycowy » Thu Jan 12, 2023 7:58 am

I can't remember if I've shared what I've studied before, but I suppose it can't hurt to post again if I did: Mohawk, Cayuga, Seneca (Onögawa'ga:'), Arapaho, Lakota, Yup'ik, Aleut. Not that I got too far with most. I probably know Lakota and Seneca best, but after years of neglect that's not saying much.

EDIT: Turns out I never shared here. Well, there you go, guys! :)
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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jan 12, 2023 3:03 pm

księżycowy wrote:I don't believe there are any Salishan languages spoken as far north as Alaska. There are plenty of Northern Athabascan languages that do not have a lot of speakers in Alaska though.
Thank you very much for the correction and good luck with Aleut! If you post about it I'll be interested to see how it compares to Inuktitut!
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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby księżycowy » Thu Jan 12, 2023 3:52 pm

I've been starting to consider which language to explore, and certainly Aleut has crossed my mind. I'm not sure if I will start with Aleut, but I would like to eventually study some, so hopefully I'll get around to those posts sooner or later.

It would be fun to compare the two. Admittedly, if I were personally to get into any of the Inuit languages, I'd probably study Iñupiaq first, as I have some grammars and what not from the University of Alaska, but Inuktitut is also of interest. I've also considered returning to the beast that is Yup'ik. Whatever the case, I probably shouldn't make any decisions at the moment, with the recovery and medications and whatnot.

I think I'll wait until February to decide; I'm not sure when I'd actually want to start though. And I certainly don't want this to take progress away from any other languages, so I'll have to plan well how to add it in and what I'll do with it.
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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jan 12, 2023 8:05 pm

księżycowy wrote:I've been starting to consider which language to explore, and certainly Aleut has crossed my mind. I'm not sure if I will start with Aleut, but I would like to eventually study some, so hopefully I'll get around to those posts sooner or later.

It would be fun to compare the two. Admittedly, if I were personally to get into any of the Inuit languages, I'd probably study Iñupiaq first, as I have some grammars and what not from the University of Alaska, but Inuktitut is also of interest. I've also considered returning to the beast that is Yup'ik. Whatever the case, I probably shouldn't make any decisions at the moment, with the recovery and medications and whatnot.

I think I'll wait until February to decide; I'm not sure when I'd actually want to start though. And I certainly don't want this to take progress away from any other languages, so I'll have to plan well how to add it in and what I'll do with it.

Oh, wishing you a speedy recovery!

I've glanced at a couple of old public domain Iñupiaq textbooks and I was very surprised how similar a lot of the vocabulary was to Inuktitut considering that they're spoken on opposite ends of the continent! Even Yup'ik seems pretty similar judging by this example sentence from the Wikipedia article on polysynthetic languages:

reindeer hunt.png


If I recall correctly, "he goes reindeer hunting" is tuttusuuq in Inuktitut, not too far off from Yup'ik. Inuktitut also has suffixes for future tense and negation, although they are a bit more different.
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Re: Team Americas - Indigenous Languages of N&S America

Postby księżycowy » Thu Jan 12, 2023 8:18 pm

Deinonysus wrote:Oh, wishing you a speedy recovery!

Thanks!

I've glanced at a couple of old public domain Iñupiaq textbooks and I was very surprised how similar a lot of the vocabulary was to Inuktitut considering that they're spoken on opposite ends of the continent! Even Yup'ik seems pretty similar judging by this example sentence from the Wikipedia article on polysynthetic languages:

reindeer hunt.png


If I recall correctly, "he goes reindeer hunting" is tuttusuuq in Inuktitut, not too far off from Yup'ik. Inuktitut also has suffixes for future tense and negation, although they are a bit more different.

The Inuit languages generally are a large dialect continuum so I'm not very surprised. Yup'ik (at least as it's presented by Jacobson) is crazy with all of the phonological changes (assimilation and the like). It's the worst one, in my opinion as far as the Eskimo-Aleut languages. It was mind bending just reading the first chapter of Jacobson. But yeah, it is interesting that Yup'ik is pretty close to the Inuit languages. They all are quite close, with the exception of Aleut. And, interestingly, from what I remember, Aleut doesn't nearly have the level of phonological changes as the other Eskimo-Aleut languages. At the very least I never remember learning any. I think that was one of the hardest things to get a handle on when I was learning Yu'pik in particular, but also when I dabbled in Iñupiaq. As if the vocabulary wasn't bad enough.
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